HUMS 228, Climate Change and the Humanities

Meeting Time: 
TTh 11:35-12:50

Course Description:

What can the Humanities tell us about climate change? The Humanities help us to better understand the relationship between everyday individual experience, and our rapidly changing natural world. To that end, students read literary, political, historical, and religious texts to better understand how individuals both depend on, and struggle against, the natural environment in order to survive.

Led By:

Katja Lindskog's picture

Professor Katja Lindskog

I hold a joint appointment in the Department of English and the Humanities Program. My current research focuses on the ways in which we can contextualize British nineteenth-century literature within the onset of the Anthropocene era and the present-day climate crisis, particularly through our past and present relationship to fossil capital in its many forms. Broadly speaking, I am hoping to expand the parameters for what constitutes useful ecocriticism in the study of Victorian literature and culture.

My essays have appeared in Victorian Poetry and Scandinavian StudiesI am currently working on an essay about Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times, as well as drafting a book manuscript about ecocriticism provisionally titled That Future Is Now: Ecocriticism in the Age of Climate Change.

Before joining the English Department at Yale, I was a Core Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University. Since arriving at Yale in 2015, I have taught courses on literature, climate change, cultural and intellectual history, and often I have designed and taught courses on all these together. From Fall 2019, I will serve as Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Directed Studies Program at Yale.